300 Days of Writing
Day 43 Haircut:
She remembered her first haircut in a real salon.
She had been nine when her mother had finally saved enough extra cash to have a treat day. “What would you like, sweet pea?”
“A haircut! A haircut!”
Her mother had tried to talk her out of it. How treat days were rare and she could cut her hair at home.
“Why waste your special day on something so functional.”
Shrugging, her mother gave in and drove her to the nearest hair salon, a locally owned place called Beauty Be Me. She marveled at the wigs on display and the banter between regulars and beauticians. The man assigned to cut her hair had chains that looped between his many earrings and had tattoos across his fingers: a heart, spade, clover, and diamond, that she grew up to realize were playing cards.
After thirty minutes of carefully paging through the look book, she told her mother she was ready, who flagged down the nice man.
“Let’s go sweetie!” he said, lowering down the red pleather chair.
“My mom calls me sweet pea,” the girl kindly corrected him. He hollered with laughter and told her she had a real attitude. “I like that,” he had said. “Us girls got to stick together!”
She nodded and closed her eyes when he misted her hair with water, combing her bangs down across her forehead.
“Okay, sweet pea. What are we thinking?”
“I want it all gone.”
“Your bangs? Okay, we can part it to the side and grow them out,” he said, already adjusting her hair.
“No. I want to cut it off. It all off. I don’t want it.”
He looked bewildered, and when she said it again, slower, thinking maybe the earrings made it hard for him to hear, he went and got her mother.
“She said what?”
As they discussed her hair, sweet pea reached forward, grasping the scissors in her hands and cut her hair as short as she could go.
They shaved the uneven bits off for her in the end.
Сайхан Бичээрэй!
H
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